Building Web-based applications can cause great demand on a company’s servers, often creating network bottlenecks which mean costly delays for development teams.

Symbiose Technologies, a Quebec-based data processing application builder however manage to dramatically cut development schedules with the help of a development tool from a Tel Aviv company.

The Visual WebGui open source development platform from Gizmox enables Symbiose developers to deliver assignments much faster by reducing the number of lines they must write for each project, according to Martin Dube, head of Symbiose.

Dube said the Visual WebGui (VWG) comes with a library of tools which facilitates easier creation and manipulation of rich Web forms. “But VWG’s main advantage is performance,” he said. “Wow. The pages load so fast.”

Symbiose designs and develops acquisition data software packages for mobile technologies. Before using VWG, the company used traditional asp.net transactional applications.

Dube said these apps were hampered by slow response times, awkward interfaces and server postback.

He said this meant his production team often invested days or weeks in coding.

“Our applications were pretty rich and asp.net didn’t allow us to achieve all the goals we were planning,” he said.

When Symbiose switched to VWG in 2007, developers were able to deliver projects that used to take weeks in a matter of days because of the tool’s mechanism.

For instance, developers working on a project now only need to send to the server data that has been changed rather than all information associated with the project. This greatly reduces traffic over the Web and demands on the server.

The VWG controls also replaced numerous and disparate third party asp.net controls providing developers with an easy to master and consistent control panel.

“Since we started using VWG, we have achieved four times more productivity,” Dube said.

Navot Peled, CEO of Gizmox, says that is most cases VWG is able to cut down development time by as much as 90 per cent.

Since its release in 2007, the software has been downloaded by more than 250,000 organizations and has over 23,000 registered users.

Peled described the product as a “Web-like desktop platform that offers open source rapid application development framework for line of business AJAX and Silverlight applications.”

He also claims that VWG is “virtually unhackable”

To prove his point, Peled last month put up a $10,000 reward for anyone who can hack into the VWG platform.

The goal of the contest is to uncover the identity of VWG’s “secret agent,” code-named OWL. The contest ends January 30, 2009.